MUSIC IS GOOD BRAIN FOOD

   With the development of brain imaging in the 1990s, it became possible to actually visualize the brains of musicians and to compare them with those of non-musicians. Using MRI morphometry, Gottfried Schlaug at Harvard and his colleagues made careful comparisons of the sizes of various brain structures. In 1995 they published a paper showing that the corpus callosum, the great commissure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is enlarged in professional musicians and that a part of the auditory cortex, the planum temporale, has an asymmetric enlargement in musicians with absolute pitch. Schlaug et al went on to show increased volumes of gray matter in motor, auditory, and visuospatial areas of the cortex, as well as in the cerebellum. Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician---but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation.
   How much, Schlaug wondered, are these differences a reflection of innate predisposition and how much an effect of early training ? One does not, of course, know what distinguishes the brains of musically gifted four-year-olds before they start musical training, but the effects of such training, Schlaug and his colleagues showed, are very great : The anatomical changes they observed with musicians' brains were strongly correlated with the age at which musical training began and with the intensity of practice and rehearsal. 
   Alvaro Pascual-Leone at Harvard has shown how rapidly the brain responds to musical training. Using five-finger piano exercises as a training test, he has demonstrated that the motor cortex can show changes within minutes of practicing such sequences. Measurements of regional blood flow in different parts of the brain, moreover, have shown increased activity in the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, as well as various areas of the cerebral cortex---not only with physical practice, but with mental practice alone.
   There is a wide range of musical talent, but there is much to suggest there is an innate musicality in virtually everyone. This has been shown most clearly by the use of the Suzuki method to train young children, entirely by ear and by imitation, to play the violin. Virtually all hearing children respond to such training. 
   The implication of all this for early education is clear. Although a teaspoon of Mozart may not make a child a better mathematician, there is little doubt that regular exposure to music, and especially active participation in music, may stimulate development of many areas of the brain ---areas which have to work together to listen to or perform music. For the vast majority of students, music can be every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

Can Civilization Survive Really Existing Capitalism ?

                 CAPITALISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT


                      LYING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

   There is a controversy, regularly reported in the media. One side consists of the overwhelming majority of scientists, all of the world's national academies of science, the professional science journals, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) . They agree that global warming is taking place ; that there is a substantial human component ; that the situation is serious and perhaps dire ; and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with severe social and economic effects. It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.
   The other side consists of skeptics, including a few respected scientists who caution that much is unknown---which means that things might be as bad as thought, or might be worse.
   Omitted from the contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics : highly regarded climate scientists who regard the regular reports of the IPCC as much too conservative.  They have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately. But they are scarcely part of the public debate, though very prominent in the scientific literature. 
   The Heartland Institute and ALEC are part of a huge campaign by corporate lobbies to sow seeds of doubt about the near-unanimous consensus of scientists that human activities are having a major impact on global warming with possibly ominous implications. The campaign was openly announced and includes the lobbying organizations of the fossil-- fuel industry, the American Chamber of Commerce(the main business lobby) , and others. The efforts of ALEC and the infamous Koch brothers, are, however, a fraction of what is underway. The initiatives are concealed in complex ways but are sometimes partially revealed,for example in a current report by Suzanne Goldenberg in the London Guardian, which finds that "conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million. . . to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change," helping to "build a vast network of think tanks (thinking tanks ??) and activist groups working to a single purpose : to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing 'wedge issue' for hardcore conservatives." 
   The propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on US public opinion, which is more skeptical than the global norm. But the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the masters. That is presumably why sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system in an effort to counter the dangerous tendency of the public to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific research.
   At the Republican National Committee's winter meeting in 2013, Governor Bobby Jindal warned the leadership "we must stop being the stupid party. . . We must stop insulting the intelligence of the voters." { Grace Wyler, "Bobby Jindal : The GOP Must Stop Being The Stupid Party," Business Insider, January 25, 2013. } ALEC and its corporate backers, in contrast, want the country to be "the stupid nation" --- and for principled reasons. 
   One of the dark-money organizations of billionaires funding climate- change denial is Donors Trust, which is also a major contributor to efforts to deny voting rights to poor Blacks. That makes sense. African-Americans tend to be Democrats, even social democrats, and might even go so far as to pay attention to science, unlike those properly trained to think critically by "balanced" teaching. 
   The major science journals regularly give a sense of how surreal all of this is. Take Science, the major US scientific weekly. In the January 18, 2013, issue it had three news items side by side . One reported that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the US, continuing a long trend. The second reported a new study by the US Global Change Research Program that provided additional evidence for rapid climate change as the result of human activities and discussed likely severe impacts. The third reported the new appointments to chair the committees on science policy chosen by the House of Representatives, where a minority of voters elected a large majority of Republicans thanks to the shredding of the political system. All three of the new chairs deny that humans contribute to climate change, two deny that it is even taking place, and one is a longtime advocate for the fossil fuel industry. The same issue of the journal has a technical article with new evidence that the irreversible tipping point may be ominously close. 
   Another report in Science from January 2013 underscores the need to ensure that we become the stupid nation. The report provides evidence that even slightly warmer temperatures, less of a rise than is currently anticipated in coming years, could start melting permafrost, which in turn could trigger the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in ice. Best to keep to "balanced education"---if, that is, we can face the grandchildren whose lives we are busy destroying.

Capitalism : What is it ?

                      REALLY EXISTING CAPITALISM

   The term "capitalism" is vague enough to cover many possibilities. It is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, which receives substantial state intervention, ranging from creative innovation to "too-big-to-fail" government insurance policy for banks, and which is highly monopolized, further limiting market reliance. 
   It's worth bearing in mind the scale of the departures of "really existing capitalism" from official "free-market capitalism." To mention only a few examples, in the past twenty-five years, the share of profits of the two hundred largest enterprises has risen sharply, carrying forward the oligopolistic character of the U.S. economy. This directly undermines markets, avoiding price wars through efforts at often-meaningless product differentiation through massive advertising, which is itself dedicated to undermining markets in the official sense, based on informed consumers making rational choices. Computers and the Internet, along with other basic components of the IT revolution, were largely in the state sector, (subsidy, procurement, and other devices) for decades before they were handed over to private enterprise for adaptation to commercial markets and profit. The government insurance policy that provides big banks with enormous advantages has been roughly estimated by economists and the business press to be on the order of some $40 billion a year. However, a recent study by the International Monetary Fund indicates --- to quote the business press --- that perhaps "the largest US banks aren't really profitable at all," adding that "the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from US taxpayers. This is more evidence to support the judgment of the most respected financial correspondent in the English-speaking world, Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times, that "an out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid." 
   The term "capitalism" is also commonly used for systems in which there are no capitalists : for example, the extensive worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque Country of Spain or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio --- often with conservative support. Some might even use the term "capitalism" to include the industrial democracy advocated by Jogn Dewey, America's leading social philosopher.  He called for workers to be "masters of their own industrial fate," and for all institutions to be under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation, and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain "the shadow cast on society by big business. " 
   The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now, control of government is narrowly concentrated at the top of the income scale, while the large majority "down below" are virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy that diverges sharply from democracy, assuming that by "democracy," we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will. 
   There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is, in principle, compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy ---RECD for short (pronounced "wrecked") ---the question is effectively answered : they are radically incompatible. It seems unlikely that civilizations can survive "really existing capitalism" and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. Could functioning democracy make a difference ? Perhaps.
   Let's focus on the most critical immediate problem that civilization faces, though not the only one : environmental catastrophe.  Policies and public attitudes diverge sharply, as is often the case under RECD. The nature of the gap is examined in several articles in a 2013 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The researchers found that "109 countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy. 
   It is not public opinion that drives policy off the international spectrum --- quite the opposite. The public is much closer to the global norm than policy. It is also much more supportive of actions to confront the likely environmental disaster predicted by an overwhelming scientific consensus --- and it is not too far off : in the lives of our grandchildren, very likely. As the Daedalus researchers found : 

     Huge majorities have favored steps by the federal government to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated when utilities produce electricity. In 2006, 86 percent of the respondents favored requiring utilities, or encouraging them with tax breaks, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit . . . Also in that year, 87 percent favored tax breaks for utilities that produce more electricity from water, wind, or sunlight. . . These majorities were maintained between 2006 and 2010 and shrank somewhat after that.

    The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy. One recent illustration of their concern is the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act being proposed to legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth. The ALEC act mandates "balanced" teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms. "Balanced teaching"is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial in order to "balance" mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the "balanced teaching" advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of "creation science" in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states. 
   The ALEC legislation is based on a project of the Heartland Institute, a corporate-funded think tank dedicated to rejecting the scientific consensus on the climate. The Heartland Institute project calls for a "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms" that aims to teach that there "is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather." Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking --- a fine idea, no doubt, but it's easy to think up far better choices than an issue selected because of its importance for corporate profits. 

   

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 68

                                                   AGENDUM FOR CHANGE

       UN INTERNATIONAL INSOLVENCY COURT{UNIIC}

Whereas the World Bank has led low-income countries ever more into the debt bondage that holds their economies and resources hostage to the predators of their global economy, the primary responsibility of the proposed UNIIC will be to help countries free themselves from this burden. A debtor government that determines its debt obligations have reached a critical level and cannot be repaid without impairing the well-being of its citizens would voluntarily initiate the insolvency procedure by presenting its case to the court. After a preliminary assessment the debtor country would be granted a stay on its repayments for a period sufficient to complete the court's review and decision process. In the meantime it would also agree to incur no new debt. 
   An assessment process would determine how much a country owes and is able to pay over time without compromising its ability to perform essential governmental functions, including the delivery of necessary social services. The Court would also review the country's debt portfolio to identify odious debts that were not legitimately contracted---which would include many World Bank and IMF loans --- or were used for purposes that yielded no public benefit---such as the World Bank designed projects that failed to produce projected benefits due to faulty design or negligent oversight. The UNIIC would sanction the repudiation of such odious debts on the basis of international legal precedents. Repudiation of World Bank and IMF loans would force them to call the guarantees from their member countries to cover their own debts, which would in turn build political support to decommission them. 
   A negotiated debt relief plan would provide for the rescheduling, reduction, and cancellation of the remaining debt on terms that would allow the indebted government to continue necessary functions, including the delivery of essential social services. Such plans would ideally take into account the implicit debt owed to the debtor country by creditor countries in the North for wealth previously extracted without proper compensation. Debt relief plans should include a schedule for freeing the country of international debt and putting in place mechanisms henceforth to keep its international accounts in balance. 

      UN INTERNATIONAL FINANCE ORGANIZATION 
                                          { UNIFO } 

Whereas, the International Monetary Fund has forced countries to deregulate the flow of money and goods across their borders and to  bear the consequences of resulting trade imbalances, international indebtedness, exploitation, and financial instability, the proposed UNIFO would work with UN member countries to achieve and maintain balance and stability in international financial relationships, free national and global finance from the distortions of international debt and debt-based money, promote productive domestic investment and domestic ownership of productive resources, and take such actions as necessary at the international level to support nations and localities in creating equitable, productive, sustainable livelihoods for all. Lacking either lending capacity or enforcement powers its functions would be limited to maintaining a central data base on international accounts, flagging problem situations, and facilitating negotiations among trading partners to correct imbalances. The UNIFO would also provide advisory services on request. Among its other functions it would facilitate the negotiation and implementation of international agreements that support joint action by national governments to prevent the use of offshore banks and tax havens for money laundering and tax evasion. 

             UN Organization For Corporate Accountability 
                                               { UNOCA }

   Whereas, the World Trade Organization regulates national and local governments to prohibit them from regulating transnational corporations, trade, and finance in the public interest, the UNOCA will assist governments in establishing sensible and appropriate regulatory regimes to assure the public accountability of international corporations and finance. To this end it will provide information and advisory services, facilitate the negotiation of relevant international agreements, and coordinate actions by national governments to break up concentrations of corporate power (especially in banking, media, and agribusiness), prevent unfair competitive practices, decharter corporations with a history of regulatory violations and repeat convictions for criminal behavior, enable persons harmed by a corporate subsidiary in one country to sue the parent company for damages in another, eliminate corporate subsidies, and prohibit corporations from attempting to influence political processes. To facilitate the process of rolling back international agreements that guarantee the right of countries and localities to : maintain balanced and mutually beneficial trading relationships with other countries ; set rules and standards for businesses---including international corporations ---operating in their jurisdictions ; prohibit the patenting of genetic materials, life forms and processes, and indigenous knowledge ; and access beneficial information and technologies from other countries on reasonable terms. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 67

                                                 AGENDUM FOR CHANGE
                                               (continued)


                  LOCALIZING THE GLOBAL SYSTEM 

   Currently, global governance functions related to economic, social, and environmental affairs are divided between the United Nations system --- comprised of the United Nations secretariat ; its 
specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization ; and its various development assistance funds such as UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, and UNIFEM ---and the Bretton Woods system ---comprised of The World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization. The Bretton Woods institutions dominate the economic policy arena, yet accept no accountability for the social and environmental consequences of their policies. The under-funded United Nations has virtually no influence over economic policies, but is left with the task of cleaning up the social and environmental messes the flawed policies of the Bretton Woods three leave in their wake. 
   The founders of the United Nations intended that coordination of international economic, social, cultural, educational, health, and related affairs, including oversight of the Bretton Woods institutions, would rest with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Although the World Bank, IMF, and WTO are officially designated specialized agencies of the United Nations, they have become far more powerful than the other specialized UN agencies and reject any UN effort to coordinate or oversee their activities. 
 Dividing the governance of the global affairs of one world between two competing governmental systems has not been a workable arrangement. A choice must ultimately be made between the Bretton Woods system and the UN system. The UN system has been only marginally effective --- in part because of under-funding, neglect, and lack of ability to influence the economic policies of the Bretton Woods institutions --- but has by far the broader mandate, is more open and democratic, is generally respectful of national sovereignty, and gives serious attention to human, social, and environmental priorities. The more secretive and undemocratic Bretton Woods institutions have greater professional competence and enforcement power, but generally take a narrowly economistic view of the world, run roughshod over national sovereignty and democratic processes, encourage competition among nations, and consistently place financial and corporate interests ahead of human and planetary interests. 
   Some would argue that the choice should favor the Breton Woods institutions because of their ability to get things done. Given that the things they do most effectively are destructive and that their coercive methods consistently disregard the will and interests of those who bear the consequences this seems a poor choice. The United Nations has been less effective, but its more open and democratic decision processes and its greater responsiveness to the will of the people affected have generally resulted in more consensual agenda aligned with human and planetary interests. Since the underlying goal is to strengthen democracy and give social and environmental goals priority over corporate profits, the more sensible choice is to reaffirm the mandate of the United Nations, invest in building its capacity to fulfill it, and decommission the Bretton Woods institutions. 
   Under its reaffirmed economic mandate the United States would work with member countries to regain control of their economies, establish necessary regulatory regimes, and orient their economies toward domestic priorities. In addition to strengthening the mandates and capacities of existing UN agencies in international economic affairs, three new UN agencies are proposed, each with a role nearly opposite of that of the Bretton Woods institution it will replace. 



                                                   

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close---Episode 66

                               AGENDUM FOR CHANGE 
                                            (continued) 

    EQUITABLE ALLOCATION OF PAID EMPLOYMENT 

Access to opportunities for paid employment should also be allocated as fairly as possible through measures to reduce the work week and assure equal employment opportunity regardless of gender, race, and other extraneous considerations.

Such measures can be phased in over time and adjusted to reflect experience. The idea here is not to provide a prescriptive blueprint but rather to illustrate the kinds of policies that would lead us to healthier societies. Different approaches will surely be appropriate in different settings, and the administration and findings of such initiatives should be undertaken by the smallest and most local governance units as possible. For example, in predominantly agrarian societies with equitable land distribution, a very small guaranteed minimum income might be adequate. The same might be true in stable egalitarian societies in which living costs are low and there are ample employment opportunities for all who wish to work. A guaranteed income is probably most necessary to correct imbalances in societies such as the United States, where living costs are high, there is extreme inequality,and jobs paying a wage adequate to maintain a decent living are scarce. 

If we are to manage our economic spaces in the human interest, we will need accounting tools suited to this purpose. Sixto Roxas, an economist and former international bank executive from the Philippines, explains that conventional national income accounts do not meet this need, because they measure the costs and benefits of economic activity from the standpoint of the firm, not the community. The differences are fundamental. For example, the firm profits by employing the least possible number of workers at the lowest possible wage. The community profits by having its members fully employed at the highest possible wage. The firm may profit by depleting a local forest or mineral resource and then moving elsewhere, while the community is left devastated.
   Roxas and his colleagues are developing community-based accounting systems that assess economic costs and benefits in terms of their consequences for the health of households, communities, and ecosystems. They also record how much of the value generated from local economic activity remains in the community and how much flows out. Thus, if local forests are being clear-cut and the timber and profits are being exported while the community is left with a barren landscape, this shows up as a net loss rather than the net gain recorded by conventional economic accounting. Significant attention is needed to developing and applying such systems as economic management tools. 

                   LOCALIZING THE GLOBAL SYSTEM 

   Transnational corporations have for decades used global institutions and international agreements to circumvent democratic processes, force open national economies, and transfer control over markets, finance, resources, and productive assets to themselves. Any agendum to reclaim economic and political spaces for people must address the need to replace this predatory system of global governance with a system that : 

* Empowers people and institutions at national and local levels to control and manage their economic resources to their own benefit ; 

* Makes it difficult for any locality to externalize its production or consumption costs beyond its borders ; and 

* Encourages cooperation among localities in the search for solutions to shared problems.

These objectives are strongly supported by the application of sound market principles. As we have already seen,to function in the public interest, markets must operate within a framework of enforceable rules that maintain the conditions of socially efficient market allocation. Otherwise productive investment is driven out by predatory speculation, cost internalizing firms are put out of business by cost externalizers, and the market becomes dominated by centrally planned corporate monopolies. It is therefore important for global institutions to support national and local governments in their efforts to implement sound market rules. Normally, such rules will favor local producers that use local resources to meet local needs and will protect local markets and resources from colonization by economic predators. At the same time, the people of a country must have the freedom to decide the extent to which they wish to integrate their national economy with the national economies of other willing partners. Whatever its level of integration, a primary obligation of the individual country to the international system is to keep its exports and imports with the rest of the world roughly in balance. 






   

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 65

                                                 AGENDUM FOR CHANGE 
                                               (continued)

                                 GUARANTEED INCOME 

   An idea long popular with both conservative and progressive economists, a guaranteed income merits serious consideration. It involves guaranteeing every person an income adequate to meet his or her basic needs. The amount would be lower for children than for adults but would be unaffected by a person's other income, wealth, work, gender, or marital status. It would replace social security and existing welfare programs. Since earned income would not reduce the guaranteed payment, there would be little disincentive to work for pay, though employers might have to pay more to attract workers to unpleasant, menial tasks. If some choose not to work, this should not be considered a problem in a labor surplus world. 
   Such a scheme would be expensive but could be supported in most high-income countries by reducing military spending, corporate welfare,and existing entitlement programs and increasing taxes on unearned income and luxuries and user fees on pollution, resource extraction, and other activities a sustainable society seeks to discourage. Combined with an adequate program of universal publicly funded health insurance and merit-based public fellowships for higher education, a guaranteed income would greatly increase the personal financial  security afforded by more modest incomes and provide greater scope for those who wish to do unpaid work in the social economy. In low-income countries, agrarian reform and other measures to assure equitable access to productive natural resources for livelihood production might appropriately substitute for a guaranteed income. 

   PROGRESSIVE INCOME AND CONSUMPTION TAXES

Taxes on incomes up to the level required to meet basic needs in a comfortable, satisfying, and responsible way should be eliminated, as should sales or Value-added taxes on basic food, clothing, shelter, health, personal hygiene, educational, and entertainment or recreational expenditures needed to sustain good living. There should, however, be a sharply graduated tax on incomes above the guaranteed minimum---going as high as 90 percent on top income brackets. In addition to a tax of at least 50 percent on estates over a million dollars, inheritance or trust income should be taxed to the receiving individual the same as any other personal income. Appropriate exceptions may be provided for family farms and businesses. 
   There should be a substantial luxury tax on nonessential consumption items that are socially harmful or environmentally wasteful or destructive. Personal charitable contributions, including family foundations, should be fully tax exempt, thus providing a substantial incentive for individuals with excess incomes to support a strong independent sector as a counter to the power of the state and the corporation. Such measures would move us toward more equitable and sustainable societies while maintaining incentives to do socially useful work. 

                                        PAY EQUITY 

    The performance of an effective organization depends on the productive contribution of all its members. It is perfectly reasonable that those who carry more responsibility and bring more to the organization be compensated accordingly. But how much more ? What is a proper ratio between the compensation of the highest and lowest paid worker in an organization ? Two to one ? Ten to one ? A hundred to one ? A thousand to one ? Ratios of well over a thousand to one are common in U.S. corporations, even if we limit the comparison to U.S workers and CEOs. A healthy society must establish a reasonable balance between economic incentive and economic justice. Public policy should provide incentives to keep the ratios within a reasonable limit, say a ratio 
of no more than fifteen to one. If a company considers its lowest paid worker is worth $10,000, then it could pay its CEO $150,000. If it raised the lowest paid worker to $20,000 then the CEO's pay could go up to $300,000. If the top jobs in a corporation or other organization are so difficult or distasteful that qualified applicants cannot be attracted for such a sum, then perhaps the job needs to be restructured. If the job is too demanding because the corporation is simply too big, then perhaps the corporation should be broken up to make it more manageable. Society can easily learn to do without the services of those who require compensation packages in the millions of dollars to motivate them to perform their jobs effectively. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close ---Episode 64

                                                          AGENDUM FOR CHANGE

                                                  (continued) 

                              CORPORATE WELFARE

   Welfare reform should give top priority to getting dependent corporations off the welfare rolls. Corporate subsidies range from resource depletion allowances to subsidized grazing fees, export subsidies, and tax abatements. Such subsidies should be systematically identified and eliminated, with the possible exception of those needed to establish and nurture locally owned, community-based enterprises. 

                            INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 

Information is the only resource we have that is nondepletable and can be freely shared without depriving anyone of its use. Every contemporary human invention necessarily builds on the common heritage of human knowledge accumulated over thousands of years and countless generations. This is the information commons of the species. The justifiable purpose of intellectual property right protection is to provide incentives for research and creative contribution, not to create protected information monopolies. Laws relating to intellectual property rights should be reformed to conform to this principle. Such rights should be defined and interpreted narrowly and granted only for the minimum time necessary to allow those who have invested in for-profit research to recover their costs and a reasonable profit. The patenting of life-forms or genetic processes, discoveries funded with public monies, or processes or technologies that give the holder effective monopoly control over a type of research or class of products should be precluded by law. As with any common heritage resource, when there is a conflict between an exclusive private interest and a community interest, the community interest should prevail. 

As business is localized, it will be possible to localize government as well. It is big business that creates the need for big government to control its excesses and clean up its messes. Similarly, it is the interference of big business that renders government ineffective. Here's a good way to describe the dynamic : 

Business assumes the role of guardianship vis-a-vis the ecosystem and fails miserably in the task ; government steps in to try to mitigate the damage ; business tries to sabotage this regulatory process and nimbly sidesteps those regulations that are put on the books; government ups the ante and thereby becomes a hydra-headed bureaucratic monster choking off economic development while squandering money ; business decries "interference in the marketplace" and sets out to redress its grievances by further corrupting the legislative and regulatory process in an attempt to become de facto guardian, if not de jure. 

   The bigger our corporations, the greater their power to externalize costs and the greater the need for big government to protect the public interest and to clean up the consequent social and environmental messes. The more we cut our giant corporations down to human scale, the more we will be able to reduce the size of government. 

   Addressing extreme inequality in the distribution of economic power is also important to decolonizing economic spaces. As our current experience shows, justice and sustainability are virtually impossible to achieve in an unequal world. Extreme inequality enables the economically powerful to colonize the environmental resources of the weak and thus consume beyond their environmental means. This commonly deprives the economically weak of their basic means of livelihood and delinks the economically strong from the environmental consequences of their actions. The excluded poor respond to their resulting insecurity by having many children ---the one thing they can call their own and their prospective source of care in their hour of need. As the rich expand their consumption and the poor produce more children,  the human burden on the planet grows.
   A more just and sustainable society with an equitable distribution of income would limit overconsumption and reduce the incentive to seek security through having large families. Measures toward this end will be discussed next time. 

CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS : NOT EVEN CLOSE --- Episode 63

                                 AGENDUM FOR CHANGE

                                              (continued)

                  Preferential Treatment For Community Banks

   The U.S. banking system was once made up of unitary or community banks that collected local savings deposits, made loans to local businesses, and financed mortgages to expand local home ownership. Successive changes in banking regulations have allowed the former community banks to be colonized by gigantic money-center banks that channel local deposits into the global money system. If the banking system is to serve local economies, the system of community banks must be restored by requiring money-center banks to divest their branches and by tightening community investment laws to require that a substantial majority of the investment portfolio of any bank covered by federal deposit insurance be invested within its service area and that all its investments meet federally mandated standards. The large, global money-center banks that wish to speculate with their depositors' money in risky investments around the world should be required to obtain deposit insurance from private insurers, with the premiums determined by the risks involved. Federal insurance should be reserved for community banks that serve community needs and play by community rules. 

        RIGOROUS ENFORCEMENT OF ANTITRUST LAWS

   Vigorous legal action should be taken to break up concentrations of corporate power. There should be a legal presumption that any acquisition or merger reduces competition and is contrary to market principles and the public interest. The burden of proving otherwise to skeptical regulators should fall squarely on those presenting such proposals. 

     WORKER AND COMMUNITY BUYOUT OPTIONS 

In most instances,the human interest is best served by patient, rooted capital. To this end, worker and community buyouts of corporate assets should be supported by public policy. For example, before a major corporation is allowed to close a plant or undertake a sale or merger, the affected workers and community should have a legal right of first option to buy the assets on preferential terms. The terms should reflect the workers' years of personal investment of labor in the company and the local community's collective investment in public facilities that have made its local operations possible. In most businesses, there are many investors in addition to the formal shareholders, and this investment should be recognized in the law. Bankruptcy rules should be structured similarly to give employees and communities the option of taking possession, on preferential terms, of the corporation's remaining assets after bankruptcy proceedings. Similarly, when a company is required to divest parts of its operation under antitrust laws, employees or the community or both should have first option to buy the divested units. Rules governing company pension funds might allow their use by employees to purchase voting control of their firm's assets. Government oversight should structure worker and community buyouts so that workers and communities have real control --- in contrast to many Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) that vest control in management. 

                                       TAX SHIFTING 

    One of the most basic, but often violated, principles of tax policy is that taxes should be assessed against activities that contribute to social and environmental dysfunction. Therefore, tax laws should be revised to reduce taxes on activities that benefit society, such as employment (including employer contributions to social security, health care, and workers' compensation) . The lost revenue would be made up by taxing activities that contribute to social and environmental dysfunction, such as resource extraction, packaging, pollution, imports, corporate lobbying, and advertising.  Such taxes would cascade up through the system to encourage more social and environmentally responsible behavior and discourage the use of harmful products. For example, a carbon emission tax at the source on coal, oil, gas, and nuclear energy would increase end-user prices and encourage conservation and conversion to solar energy sources such as solar heating , wind, hydro, photovoltaic, and biomass. Resulting increases in transportation costs would provide a nondiscriminatory natural tariff to encourage the localization of markets. The added cost of automobile commuting would encourage investment in public transit and and locating closer to one's work. A tax on pollution emissions would encourage pollution control. A tax on the extraction of virgin materials would encourage conversion to less polluting,  less materials-intensive product designs and modes of production and a greater reliance on recycled materials.   Assessing manufacturers an amount sufficient to cover estimated costs to dispose of their product packaging would discourage unnecessary packaging . Import tariffs would encourage economic self-reliance. 

                          ANNUAL PROFIT PAYOUT 

    Instead of taxing corporate profits, corporations should be required to pay out their profits each year to their shareholders . Profits would thus be taxed as shareholder income at the shareholders' normal marginal rate --- much like mutual fund earnings are now taxed. The double taxation of corporate profits ---once to the corporation and once to the shareholder --- would be eliminated, along with the deferral of shareholder taxes and the many distortions that the corporate income tax introduces into corporate decision making. If this were carried out universally, corporations would have no incentive to shift profits around the world to the jurisdiction with the lowest tax rate. Interest payments on debt financing would come directly out of profits rather than out of taxes, thus discouraging the use of debt and encouraging greater reliance on equity financing. Many leveraged buyouts that depend on the tax deductibility of interest to make them profitable would be discouraged. Corporations would be taxed on specific activities that it is in society's interest to limit, such as the use of carbon fuels, resource extraction, and speculative financial transactions. Such taxes would be difficult to avoid. Corporate expansion would also become more difficult--- a step toward keeping markets more competitive --- because a company would not be able to grow simply because management decided to reinvest its profits rather than paying them out to shareholders. If a corporation wanted funds to expand, it would need to raise new money in the financial markets and make its case accordingly. Shareholders could, of course, be given the option of rolling over their dividends into additional stock, much like the current U.S procedure on the taxation of earnings from mutual funds. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 62

                             AGENDUM FOR CHANGE
                                       (continuation )


                RECLAIMING OUR ECONOMIC SPACES

   Both capitalism and communism acknowledge a basic truth expressed by the popular aphorism, "He who has the gold rules." Communist theory explicitly calls for worker ownership of the means of production. Adam Smith implicitly assumed worker ownership in his vision of an ideal market economy composed of small farmers and artisans, a circumstance in which owner, manager, and worker are commonly one and the same. In practice, both communism and capitalism have failed to live up to their ideal. Communism vested property rights in a distant state and denied the people any means of holding the state accountable for its exercise of those rights. Capitalism persistently transfers property rights to giant corporations and financial institutions that are largely unaccountable to even their owners. 
   There is an important structural alternative : a market economy composed primarily, though not exclusively, of family enterprises,small-scale co-ops, worker-owned firms, and neighborhood and municipal corporations. Malaysian consumer activist Bishan Singh calls it the community enterprise economy, as it melds the market forces of the money economy with the community forces of the social economy. Historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz argues that such a major restructuring of the American economy is already under way : 

   led by civic-minded entrepreneurs, innovative labor unions and effective local governments. The number of firms now experimenting with worker-ownership approaches 10,000, involving perhaps 12 million people --- more than the entire membership of private-sector trade unions. There are also more than 30,000 co-ops, including 4,000 consumer goods co-ops, 13,000 credit unions, nearly 100 cooperative banks and more than 100 cooperative insurance companies. Add to this 1,200 rural utilities and nearly 5,000 housing co-ops, plus another 115 telecommunication and cable co-ops. 

   A common element of these ownership innovations is that they establish local control of productive assets through institutions that are anchored in and accountable to the community. This tends to make capital patient and rooted, an essential condition of stable, healthy communities. Such initiatives are thus vitally important in building the foundations of healthy societies, but they are seriously disadvantaged by economic policies and institutions that favor the large, the global, and the predatory. Reclaiming our economic spaces requires that we transform such policies and institutions to shift the advantage in favor of the small and the locally accountable. To do so, we will need to restore the integrity and proper function of our financial institutions and systems, shift the social and environmental costs of production to producers and the users of their products, eliminate subsidies to big business, localize markets, deconcentrate capital ownership, establish corporate accountability, and restore market competition. The term transform is used advisedly. If these measures seem to run counter to the current trend toward the big and the global, that is precisely the intent. The goal is to transform an undemocratic and rapacious capitalist economy into a democratic and socially efficient market economy. 

                     FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS TAX 

  A small tax on the purchase and sale of financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, and derivatives would be a disincentive to very short-term speculation and arbitraging and remove an important source of unearned financial profit. 

 GRADUATED SURTAX ON SHORT-TERM CAPITAL GAINS

   Capital gains on assets held only for a brief time are usually a form of unearned income and are appropriately taxed at rate higher than the rate of tax on earned income. A surtax on net short-term capital gains above and beyond the normal income tax would make many forms of speculation unprofitable, stabilize financial markets, and lengthen investment perspectives without penalizing long-term productive investment. The capital gains surtax on the sale of an asset held less than a week might be as high as 80 percent on the otherwise untaxed portion, falling to 50 percent on assets held  more than a week but less than six months, 35 percent on those held for more than six months but less than three years, 10 percent for assets held from three to six years, and 0 percent beyond that. 

One Hundred Percent Reserve Requirement On Demand Deposits

 AS far back as 1948, Henry C. Simmon, founder of the conservative University of Chicago school of economic monetarism, argued for a 100 percent reserve requirement on demand deposits to limit banks' ability to create money and to restore the money creation function to government. Many economists have since called for a similar measure The reserve requirement in the United States currently averages less than 10 percent. Phased in over several years to allow the financial system to adjust, this action would deflate the borrowing pyramid and help restore the connection between the creation of money and the creation of wealth. 

     TIGHT REGULATION OF FINANCIAL DERIVATIVES 

   Many forms of derivatives are basically high-risk gambling instruments that serve primarily to generate fees for the investment houses that package and sell them while creating dangerous financial instability. Like any other form of gambling, their creation, sale, and purchase should be tightly regulated and heavily taxed. Pension funds and other funds managed as public trusts should be strictly prohibited from trading in instruments so classified and from investing in companies that do. All publicly held corporations that engage in derivatives trading should be required to include a full report each quarter on their derivatives trading activities, report their potential financial exposure on such instruments, and reveal the proportion of their financial assets held in derivatives. 

Corporations Are Not Humans: Not Even Close ---Episode 61

                                 AGENDUM FOR CHANGE 

It's time to deal with specific measures to transform governance to reclaim our colonized political and economic spaces and restore the rights of the people. The aim is to limit the power and freedom of the largest corporations in order to restore democracy and the rights and freedoms of people and communities. This requires more than simple reforms. 

                 RECLAIMING OUR POLITICAL SPACES 

Political rights belong to the people, not to artificial business entities. The claim by corporations to to the same constitutional rights as natural-born person is a legal perversion without moral or legal foundation. As instruments of public policy, corporations should obey the laws decided by the citizenry, not write those laws. The corporate claim to First Amendment free speech protection , on which corporations base their right to lobby and carry out public campaigns on political issues, is particularly pernicious. By invoking this right, corporations achieve precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent : domination of public thought and discourse. 
   We must give high priority to legislative and judicial action aimed at establishing the legal principle that corporations are public bodies created by issuing a public charter to serve public needs and have only those privileges specifically extended to them by their charters or the law. These privileges are properly subject to withdrawal or revision at any time through popular referendum or legislative action. If a corporation persistently seeks to exceed the privileges granted by its charter --- such as consistently violating laws regarding toxic dumping --- it is the right and responsibility of citizens, acting through their government, to disband it by withdrawing its charter. It is the same as their right to abolish any public body that, in their judgment, no longer serves the public interest.

   Shareholders, managers, employees, consumers, and others have every right in their capacity as private citizens to express their political views for or against the corporate interest. They also have the right to form and fund not-for-profit organizations to advance any cause they choose to support in their private capacities using their personal funds. Corporations have no such natural right. They simply do not belong in people's political spaces.
   A first step toward removing corporations from the political 
sphere would be to eliminate all tax exemptions for corporate expenditures related to lobbying, public "education," public charities, or political organizations of any kind. The ultimate goal, however, is to prohibit the involvement of publicly traded corporations in any activity intended to influence the political process or to "educate" the public on issues of policy or the public interest. Furthermore, corporate officers should be prohibited by law from acting in their corporate capacities to solicit political contributions or political advocacy efforts from employees, suppliers, or customers. 
   The increasingly aggressive use by corporations of not-for-profit organizations as fictitious citizen fronts for corporate political lobbying highlights how thin the line is that separates corporate involvement in public education and charitable giving from overt political involvement. Even corporate giving to true public charities and the arts has become increasingly suspect. For example, when New York City proposed a sweeping smoking ban in public places in the fall of 1994, the Philip Morris Corporation made known to the city's many arts organizations it had funded that it expected their support in opposing the ban. 
   A publicly traded corporation will almost inevitably align its charitable giving with its own financial interests. There is little other basis on which it can justify allocating shareholder profits for charitable purposes. If corporations truly care about the communities in which they reside, then let them provide good, secure jobs and safe products, maintain a clean environment, obey the law, and pay their rightful share of taxes.  Let their managers, shareholders, and employees contribute to charitable and educational causes of their choice from their share of the corporation's distributed wages, salaries, and profits of the corporation.
   Similarly, any nonprofit organization in which 50 percent or more of the trustees are senior officers of corporations with more than $500 million in total assets should be ineligible for tax-exempt status on the presumption that it is a front organization operated to advance the corporate interest. When nonprofit organizations with corporate boards raise public monies, issue public statements, or make presentations to public bodies, they should be required to identify themselves as such. 

   Removing corporations from political participation is an essential step toward reclaiming our political spaces. It is not, however, sufficient. New York Times columnist Russell Baker all too accurately described the 1994 U.S. congressional elections as an auction, more of a bidding war to outspend opponents on negative campaign ads than a campaign of vision, issues, and competence. This trend has left American voters increasingly disillusioned with democracy and outraged at a government controlled by big-money interests. 
   Politics in America has been reduced to a system of legalized bribery. If democracy is to survive, reforms must get corporations and bribery out of politics. The ability to spend millions of dollars to saturate the electronic media, especially television,with negative messages about one's opponent has become a key to winning elections. So long as winning an election is excessively expensive and the only sources of adequate funding are powerful financial interests, policy will favor financial interests over the public interest. Setting term limits or voting incumbents out of office will accomplish very little.  Three deep and sweeping campaign reforms are necessary : 

1. Public elections should be publicly funded. Political action committees should be abolished, and corporations should be prohibited from making any kind of political contribution or using corporate resources to favor  any candidate or issue in a political campaign. 

2. Total campaign expenditures should be limited. Let candidates concentrate on competing to get their messages out as effectively as possible within a set spending limit ---a better measure of their ability to spend public funds responsibly. 

3. In return for their right to use public airways, television and radio stations should be required to provide exposure for candidates for public office on issues-oriented interview programs and debates on an equal-time basis. Informing the public about the views and qualifications of candidates for office is one of the most basic responsibilities of the news media in a democracy, and they should be held accountable for fulfilling it. 

   With their dominance of the mass media and their growing infiltration of the classroom, corporations increasingly control and shape our primary institutions of cultural reproduction, constantly reinforcing the values of consumerism and the basic doctrines of corporate libertarianism in an effort to align mainstream culture with the corporate interest.  To reclaim our colonized political spaces, we must reclaim our colonized cultural spaces. Three measures merit serious consideration : 

1. MEDIA ANTITRUST.  Special antitrust legislation for the media should establish that it is prima facie evidence of monopolistic intent for a single corporation to own more than one major public media outlet, whether a newspaper, radio station, TV station, or home cable service. Furthermore, the operation of a media outlet should be the primary business of the corporation that owns it. This would ensure that the outlet is not used primarily as a means to advance other corporate interests. No individual should be allowed to have a majority holding in more than one such media corporation. This would enhance the free-speech rights of the public by limiting the ability of a few powerful individuals and corporations to dominate access to the major means of public communication.

2. ADVERTISING.  In classical market economics, the role of business is to respond to market demand, not to create it. Tax deductions for advertising provide a public subsidy for hundreds of billions of dollars a year in corporate advertising aimed at enticing people to buy things that they neither want nor need and creating a consumer culture detrimental to the health of society and the planet. Advertising, other than purely informative advertising based on verifiable facts regarding the uses, specifications, and availability of a product, is not in the public interest. At a minimum, the costs should not be deductible as a business expense. In addition, as a pollution control measure, a public fee might be assessed on advertising in outdoor or other public spaces with the proceeds used to fund public-interest consumer education. Factual product information might be provided on demand through product directories, including on-demand directories that are accessible through computer services and interactive TV. 

3. SCHOOLS.  Schools should be declared advertising-free zones, administration of public schools should remain a public-sector function, and corporate-sponsored teaching modules should be banned from classroom use under the ban on in-school advertising. 

Reclaiming our political spaces goes hand in hand with reclaiming our economic spaces.

Corporations Are Not Humans : NotEven Close --- Episode 60

                                                          GOOD LIVING
                                         (continuation)

     From Overconsumption To Sustainable Community 
                                         (continuation)


                              SUSTAINABLE  LIVELIHOODS


   An important part of the demand for economic growth comes from the carefully cultivated myth that the only way we can keep people employed is to expand aggregate consumption to create jobs at a faster rate than corporations invest in labor-saving technology to eliminate them.  We neglect an important alternative --- to redefine the problem and concentrate on creating livelihoods rather than jobs.
   A job is defined by Webster's New World Dictionary as " a specific piece of work, as in one's trade, or done by agreement for pay ; anything one has to do ; task ; chore ; duty." A livelihood is defined as "a means of living or of supporting life." A job is a source of money. A livelihood is a means of living. Speaking of jobs evokes images of people working in factories and fast-food outlets of the world's largest corporations. Speaking of sustainable livelihoods evokes images of people and communities engaged in meeting individual and collective needs in environmentally responsible ways --- the vision of a local system of self-managing communities.
   We could be using advances in technology to give everyone more options for good, sustainable living. If we so choose, instead of demanding that those fortunate enough to have jobs sacrifice their family and community lives on the altar of competition while others languish in the ranks of the unemployed, we could be organizing our societies around a twenty-to thirty-hour work-week to assure secure and adequately compensated employment for almost every adult who wants a job. The time thus freed could be devoted to the social economy in activities that meet unmet needs and rebuild a badly tattered social fabric. 
   The possibilities are extraordinary once we acknowledge that many existing jobs not only are unsatisfying but also involve producing goods and services that are either unnecessary or cause major harm to society and to the environment. This includes a great many of the jobs in the automobile, chemical, packaging, and petroleum industries ; most advertising and marketing jobs ; the brokers and financial portfolio managers engaged in speculative and other extractive forms of investment ; ambulance-chasing lawyers ; 14 million arms industry workers worldwide; and the 30 million people employed by the world's military forces.
   This leads to a startling fact. Societies would be better off if, instead of paying hundreds of millions of people sometimes outrageous amounts to do work that is harmful to the quality of our living, we gave them the same pay to sit home and do nothing.  Although far from an optimal solution, it would make more sense than the wholly irrational practice of organizing societies to pay people to do things that result in a net reduction in real wealth and well-being. Why not organize to support them instead to do activities that are socially beneficial and environmentally benign, such as providing loving care and attention to children and the elderly, operating community markets and senior citizen centers, educating our young people, counseling drug addicts, providing proper care for the mentally ill, maintaining parks and commons, participating in community crime watch, organizing community social and cultural events, registering voters, cleaning up the environment, replanting forests, doing public-interest political advocacy, caring for community gardens, organizing community recycling programs, and retrofitting homes for energy conservation. Similarly, many of us could use more time for recreation, quiet solitude, and family life and to practice the disciplines and hobbies that keep us physically, mentally, psychologically, and spiritually healthy.
   Our problem is not too few jobs ; it is an economic structure that creates too much dependence on paid employment and then pays people to do harmful things while neglecting so many activities that are essential to a healthy society. It is instructive that until the last fifteen to twenty-five years, most adults---the majority women --- served society productively in unpaid work in the social economy. In many instances, these societies had a stronger social fabric and offered their members a greater sense of personal security and fulfillment than does our own.

   Although initiatives toward creating sustainable livelihood economies may evolve in different ways in response to different circumstances and aspirations, we may infer some of their features from the above principles and examples. For example, in urban areas, they would most likely be organized around local urban villages or neighborhoods that bring residential work, recreation, and commercial facilities together around sustainable production to meet local needs with a substantial degree of self-reliance. They would feature green spaces and intensive human interaction and seek considerable self-reliance in energy, biomass, and materials production.
   Human and environmental productive activities would be melded into local, closed-loop coproduction processes that recycle sewage, solid waste, and even air through fish ponds, gardens, and green areas to continually regenerate their own resource inputs. Urban agriculture and aquaculture, repair and reuse, and intensive recycling would provide abundant livelihood opportunities in vocations that increase sustainability. Organizing these activities around neighborhoods that are also largely self-reliant in social services would help renew family and community ties, decentralize administration, and increase the sharing of family responsibilities between men and women. Needs for transporting people and goods would be reduced. Locally produced foods would be fresh and unpackaged or preserved in reusable containers. 
   We might find a wide range of traditional and electronic-age cottage industries, many involved in various kinds of recycling, existing side by side with urban agriculture. Family support services such as community-based day care, family counseling, schools, family health services, and multipurpose community centers could become integral neighborhood functions, engaging people in useful and meaningful work within easy walking distance of their homes. Many localities may issue their own local currency to facilitate local transactions and limit the flow of money out of the community. Most adults would divide their time between activities relating to the money economy and those relating to the social economy. We would see a return of the multifunctional home that serves as a center of family and community life and drastically reduces dependence on the automobile and other energy - intensive forms of transportation. We might line our byways with trees rather than billboards. We might limit advertising to product information that is available on demand, only when we want it.
   On the path to true social efficiency, we would have ample time for other aspects of living, including recreation, cultural expression, intellectual and spiritual development, and political participation. We might travel to other facilities for cultural exchanges. We might maintain friendships and collegial relations with others around the world by videophone. Or we might conference on computer networks to share exotic recipes, ideas on how to organize a local food co-op, or experiences in campaigning to improve public transit service. We might tune in to the news broadcasts from Russia, India, and Chile to see how people there are reacting to election results in South Africa. 
   We do have the option of creating healthy societies that allow us to live whole lives. It is time to reclaim our power and get on with that task. 



     

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 59

                                        GOOD LIVING

                                            (continued

    From Overconsumption To Sustainable Community ---con't

                                                                    MATERIALS

To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our "garbage index"---that which we throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for use --- to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.
   Individual consumers are regularly urged to sort and recycle discards ---an important but insufficient measure. Many of the most important decisions are out of our hands, and much of the garbage related to our individual consumption is created and discarded long before any product reaches us. The market rarely offers us a choice of a daily newspaper printed on recycled paper using nontoxic, biodegradable ink. Nor can we ensure that the dutifully bundled newspapers we place at curbside for recycling will indeed be recycled. Such decisions lie in the hands of publishers, paper manufacturers, politicians, and government bureaucrats.
   
   Over a twenty-year period, assuming current levels of recycling, the typical American household "consumes" the equivalent of roughly 100 trees in the form of newsprint. Sixty to 65 percent of that newsprint is devoted to advertisements. Even though we may never read and have no interest in the ads, we are not given the option of subscribing to a paper without them. 
   According to the Worldwatch Institute, "most materials used today are discarded after one use --- roughly two-thirds of all aluminum, three-fourths of all steel and paper, and an even higher share of plastic. " The physical environment is disrupted to to extract the materials involved, vast amounts of garbage are generated, we work extra hours to earn the money to keep replacing what is discarded, and we become beasts of burden endlessly toting replacements from the store to our homes and then out to the garbage. This may be good for the economy, corporate profits, and executive salaries ; but it degrades the quality of our living. 
   Recycling not only reduces the environmental costs of resource extraction, it saves energy as well. Producing steel from scrap requires only a third as much energy as producing it from ore, reduces air pollution by 85 percent, reduces water pollution by 76 percent, and eliminates mining wastes. Making newsprint from recycled paper takes 25 to 60 percent less energy than producing it from virgin wood pulp, while reducing the release of air pollution by 74 percent and water pollutants by 35 percent. Reuse produces even more dramatic gains. Recycling the glass in a bottle reduces energy consumption by a third, while cleaning and reusing the bottle itself can save as much as 90 percent of the energy required to make a new bottle. 
   Germany has pioneered the idea of life-cycle product planning and responsibility. Government mandated programs encourage manufacturers of automobiles and household appliances to assume responsibility for the disassembly, reuse, and recycling of their products. Besides being environmentally sound, this practice relieves the consumer of the burden of disposing of those items at the end of their useful lives. Life-cycle management can be carried out through lease agreements in which the ownership of the item remains with the manufacturer, which becomes responsible for both maintenance and disposal and thus has an incentive to design products for maximum durability and ease of recycling. 
   Governments can encourage producers to design their products and packaging to limit disposal by charging them a fee to cover the estimated public cost of eventual disposal. Governments can also require that multisized and odd-shaped beverage and other containers be replaced with standardized, durable, glass containers that can be reused many times simply by washing and relabeling. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 58

                                         GOOD LIVING 
                                             (continued)

    From OverconsumptionTo Sustainable Community
                                             (continued)

                                  FOOD AND AGRICULTURE

  Our food and agriculture system is similarly designed to generate profits for giant chemical and agribusiness corporations with little regard for the health of people and the ecosystem. This system features chemical-intensive, mechanized production ; long-distance shipping ; captive contract producers ; migrant laborers paid bare subsistence wages ; and large government subsidies paid to giant corporations. The system is suited to the profitable mass production of standardized food products, but comes at the cost of depleting soils and aquifers, contaminating water with chemical runoff, and driving out the small family farms that were for many years the backbone of strong rural communities. This system delivers to the consumer highly processed, wastefully packaged foods of dubious nutritional value contaminated with chemical residues. Although the system abundantly fills supermarkets, it features misleading nutritional claims ; strongly resists any effort to inform consumers about additives, synthetic hormones, genetically modified 
organisms, and toxic residues they may be ingesting ; and gives consumers little option of choosing organically grown, unprocessed foods produced by local farmers. Our food choices have largely been reduced to whatever big corporations find it most profitable. 
   Even as adults intent on exercising healthful and responsible choice, we seldom have any way of knowing whether the piece of fish we are about to buy was caught by a massive foreign factory trawler sweeping the ocean bare with fine mesh drift nets or harvested by a local fisherman using environmentally responsible gear. We have no way of knowing whether a piece of meat is from an animal raised on properly managed, natural rangelands or from one raised on unstable lands from which tropical forests were recently cleared and fattened in feedlots on grain that might otherwise have fed hungry people. There is no way to tell whether the cows that supply our milk have been injected with artificial hormones, because under pressure from MONSANTO corporation, the government prohibits the labeling that would tell us.
   If our goal is to provide a good living for people, we need to transform our food and agriculture system as much as we must we must transform our habitats and transportation systems. Ou goal must be to optimize the use of land and water resources to meet an expanding population's needs for a nutritionally adequate diet, fiber, and livelihoods. And we must do it in an environmentally sustainable way.
   An appropriate system would most likely be composed of tens of thousands of intensively managed, small family farms producing a diverse range of food, fiber, livestock, and energy products for local markets. Farming practices would use bio-dynamic methods to maintain soil fertility, retain water, and control pests. The food system would be designed to limit, contain, and recycle contaminants---including recycling human wastes --- and would depend  primarily on renewable solar-generated energy sources --- including animal power and biogas --- for preparation, production, processing, storage, and transport. Steps toward such a system would include carrying out agrarian reform to break up large corporate agricultural holdings, providing adequate credit facilities for small farmers, creating farmer- based research and extension systems oriented to bio-intensive methods, requiring full and accurate labeling of food products, eliminating financial and environmental subsidies for agricultural chemicals, increasing the costs of food transport by eliminating energy and other transportation subsidies, and creating locally accountable watershed management authorities to coordinate measures for soil and water protection. 
   Although moving toward more localized food and agriculture systems and healthier, less fatty diets would require adjustments in our eating habits, this is not a vision of sacrifice and deprivation. Rather, it is a vision of a fertile earth and of vibrant and secure human communities populated by people with healthy bodies and minds nourished by wholesome, uncontaminated foods. The elements of this vision are technically and socially feasible. They simply require reconstructing the relevant systems in line with the human rather than the corporate interest. 

Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 57

                                            GOOD LIVING---continued

              From Overconsumption To Sustainable Community
                                                  (continued)

                          URBAN SPACE AND TRANSPORT

   In Reclaiming Our Cities and Towns, David Engwicht reminds us that people invented cities as places devoted to human interaction.  The purpose of cities is to "facilitate exchange of information , friendship, material goods, culture, knowledge, insight, and skills" with little need for travel." Cities once consisted primarily of exchange places for people --- places such as shops, schools, residences, and public buildings. The pathways that connected exchange spaces were also places to meet and reaffirm relationships with neighbors. 
  The automobile has changed our cities in fundamental ways, colonizing ever more of the spaces that were once devoted to human exchange and transforming them into systems of parking lots connected by highways. Thus, many of the spaces that once brought us together have been converted into noisy, congested, polluting places that isolate us from one another and destroy the quality of city life. The faster and more densely the traffic flows through our neighborhood, the less we feel at home there and the less likely we are to relate to and befriend our neighbors. 
   The automobile is not only one of our least energy-efficient modes of transportation, it is also one of our least space efficient. When we take into account the multiple parking spaces that each car must have at home, office, shopping center, church, recreational facilities, and school, plus the amount of road space required for its movement, the total space required by each family car is typically three times greater than the space occupied by the average family home. 
   One reason people flee to the suburbs is to escape the environmental and social consequences of giving cities over to automobiles. When productive agricultural lands are paved over, we become separated from nature and one another by even greater distances, our dependence on automobiles increases,and per capita energy consumption skyrockets, both for transportation and to heat and cool the detached, single-family dwellings in which suburbanites live. There is sound foundation for the conclusion of urban ecologists William Rees and Mark Roseland that "sprawling suburbs are the most economically, environmentally, and socially costly pattern of residential development humans have ever devised." 
   Automobile companies sell their products as tickets to freedom, defined in many auto ads as the escape by automobile from city and suburbs to the unspoiled countryside. It is ironic, because the automobile has been perhaps the single greatest contributor to making our urban areas unlivable, turning our countryside into sprawling suburbs and strip malls, and making us more dependent on cars to survive the consequences of this affliction. 
   In 1950, the average American drove some 2,356 miles. That figure has risen to 6,014 miles by 1990. Greater Freedom ???? Roughly half of the miles Americans drive involve commuting to work on congested roadways. Between 1969 and 1990, the number of miles traveled to work by the average American household increased 16 percent. The second major use of cars is shopping. The average distance traveled for shopping increased by 88 percent. A third use is for matters such as business travel, delivering children to and from school, doctor visits, and church attendance ---up 135 percent. Social and recreational travel actually declined by 1 percent, perhaps because we had less time left for it. It is estimated that in the largest U.S. urban areas, 1 billion to 2 billion hours a year are wasted due to traffic congestion. In Bangkok, the average worker loses the equivalent of forty-four working days a year sitting in traffic.
   It is not difficult to figure out who benefits from this damage to the quality of our living. In terms of sales, the three largest corporations in America are General Motors (cars), Exxon Corporation (oil), and Ford Motor Company (cars). Mobil Corporation (oil) is number seven. 
   In 1992 Groiningen, a Dutch city of 170,000 people, dug up its city-center highways and took a variety of steps to make the bicycle the main form of transportation. As a consequence, business has improved, rents have increased, and the flow of people out of the city has been reversed. Local businesses that once fought any restraint on the automobile are now clamoring for more restraint. 
   It is a step that many more cities should take. Few measures would do more to improve the quality of our living and the health of our environment than organizing living spaces to reduce our dependence on the automobile. Other actions to help accomplish this include planning and controlling the use of urban space to increase urban density and the proximity of work, home, and recreation ; restricting parking facilities ; increasing taxes on gasoline ; and investing in public transit and facilities for pedestrians and cyclists.
   "Hold on," says the corporate libertarian. "What about the impact on the economy ? One job in six in the United States is linked to the auto industry. In Australia, it is one in ten. Unemployment would skyrocket and stock prices would plummet if we were to reorganize space to do away with the automobile. It would be an economic disaster."

   This important point is best answered with another question. Is it rational to structure an economy so that investors profit from socially harmful investments and the only employment people can find involves doing things that reduce our quality of life ? An intelligent species can surely find a better way to provide people with a means of livelihood.